Universities have been subjected to continuous government reforms since the 1980s, to make them ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘efficient’ and aligned to the predicted needs and challenges of a global knowledge economy. Under increasing pressure to pursue ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, many universities are struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, improve social mobility and equality and act as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary research project, University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation (URGE), this collection analyses the new landscapes of public universities emerging across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and the different ways that academics are engaging with them.

What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever. "It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.” -CNN Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals. “A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.” –Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

A powerful, hopeful critique of the unnecessary death spiral of higher education, The Great Mistake is essential reading for those who wonder why students have been paying more to get less and for everyone who cares about the role the higher education system plays in improving the lives of average Americans.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. Nichols has deeper concerns than the current rejection of expertise and learning, noting that when ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy-or in the worst case, a combination of both. The Death of Expertise is not only an exploration of a dangerous phenomenon but also a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age.

This fascinating work analyzes the meaning and impact of homicidal threats, the means by which they are communicated, and their development from infrequent private occurrence to ongoing social problem. Using data from the Stalking and Violence Project and recent events including the Virginia Tech massacre, Stephen Morewitz explores the lives of the men (and to a lesser degree, women) who make threats against their partners, strangers, social groups, and institutions.

For most of human history there was little question about whether someone was dead or alive--a heartbeat or a pulse, or a foggy mirror under the nostrils, provided sufficient evidence. But in the mid-20th century, with new technologies and medical interventions that prolonged the dying process, the questions around the precise moment of death became much more complicated. Today the global medical community recognizes three general definitions of death: whole-brain, circulatory or somatic, and higher-brain. But even in the United States alone no single concept of death has the support of the majority of its citizens. Despite attempts to create and establish a uniform definition of death, physicians and policymakers continue to disagree on criteria and standards--resulting in confusion and acrimony in medicine, law, and insurance, not to mention families gathered around the bedside of a dying loved one. In this brief introduction Veatch and Ross lay out the history of this contentious issue and describe the three major definitions of death in detail. They contend that choosing a particular definition of death reflects an individual's basic religious and philosophical beliefs about what is essential to human existence. So while they propose higher-brain death as a default policy, they argue for some degree of personal choice.

lt is with great pleasure that I write this preface for Or Li's book, wh ich addresses the venerable and vexing issues surrounding the problem of whether death can be a harm to the person who dies. This problem is an ancient one which was raised long ago by the early Greek philosopher Epicurus, who notoriously argued that death is at no time a harm to its 'victim' because before death there is no harrn and after death there is no victim. Epicurus's conclusion is conspicuously at odds with our prereflective and in most cases our post-reflective-intuitions, and numerous strategies have therefore been proposed to refute or avoid the Epicurean conclusion that death cannot be an evil after all. How then are we to account for our intuition that death is not just an evil, but perhaps the worst evil: that may befall us? This is the key issue that Or Li addresses. Or Li's book explores various alternative approaches to the complex and difficult issues surrounding Epicurus's notorious argument and provides a defence ofthe intuitively plausible conclusion that death can indeed be a harm to the person who dies. This challenge to Epicurus's claim that death is never a harm to the person who dies is developed by way of a detailed exploration of the issues raised not only by Epicurus, but also by his many successors, who have responded variously to the challenging issues which Epicurus raised.